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Dear Developer, the Web Isn't About You

191 points by NoGravitas 9y ago

akincisor 9y ago
Unrelated to the content, this is the best way to archive a presentation with notes that I've found. Much faster to read than to see an hour long video and not as cryptic as a bunch of mostly content-free slides.
- cbcoutinho 9y ago
  I totally agree, this is a way better format than the slideshare service through linkedin.
  - hexo 9y ago
    there really is something like slideshare through linkedin? rofl
    - cbcoutinho 9y ago
      You've never seen static powerpoint slides uploaded to the linkedin slideshare site? Besides pdf files this is what I run into sometimes with physics and computational science presentations https://www.slideshare.net/linkedin https://www.slideshare.net/linkedin
- blakesterz 9y ago
  Any idea what she used to do this?
  - Deimorz 9y ago
    Appropriately, I'm going to guess it was with HTML and CSS.
  - tim333 9y ago
    Probably jekyll https://sonniesedge.co.uk/posts/jekyll https://sonniesedge.co.uk/posts/jekyll
- Deimorz 9y ago
  Maciej Ceglowski puts his talks up in a similar format (most recent example: http://idlewords.com/talks/ancient_web.htm http://idlewords.com/talks/ancient_web.htm). It definitely makes them easy to read, refer back to, etc.
- cpeterso 9y ago
  Ironically, this presentation is unusable on my phone in landscape orientation. The responsive landscape layout is a narrow column with just 2-3 words per line and tons of whitespace.
vesrah 9y ago
The requirements for the kind of things described here often come from above us in the form of creative comps, feature requirements, timeline constraints with respect to required functionality, etc. This is something that should probably have been touched on in this article. I do completely agree with the sentiment, so I guess this is just me projecting frustration :)
- fhood 9y ago
  I think a lot of people agree with the sentiment. Most of the points here are ones that have been hashed and rehashed countless times in various blog posts and whatnot. People just tend to write code first, and only worry about optimization if it becomes an explicit issue.
- smoe 9y ago
  I'm not sure if the requirement from above is true most of the time. A lot of developers nowadays default to using a SPA as the starting point for everything without even considering if they actually need the whole bouquet of fronted build pipeline, innumerable dependencies, reactive something and a dozen layers of abstractions to hardly do more than loading and turning JSON into html while showing a spinning thing. Sure, there are plenty of features of frontend frameworks that come in handy. But how often do devs truly analyze what the best tool for the job is vs. chasing after that shiny newthing.js which just came out.
  - CM30 9y ago
    I don't think it's just about novelty here (though as said, chasing the new shiny thing seems to play a large role none the less), but also because: 1. Developers want their CV/resume to look good for the next job, and the best way to do that is to have a bunch of fancy technologies and frameworks on it. Going for what's simple and works best is great, but unfortunately not something recruiters (especially at large tech companies) care much about. 2. They're used to that one language or framework, and hence think every single problem under the sun should be solved with it. It's the old 'when all you have is a hammer' issue, and endemic in every company from the small agency to the large tech corporation.
jopuwep12489 9y ago
So glad to see this sentiment here, while every other HN post is about Javascript framework of the month. This is how you make stuff on the web.
saagarjha 9y ago
While I agree with the overall argument, there are a couple of points the author made on HTML that I don't think are quite true: > It is this flirty declarative nature makes HTML so incredibly robust. Just look at this video. It shows me pulling chunks out of the Amazon homepage as I browse it, while the page continues to run. > Let’s just stop and think about that, because we take it for granted. I’m pulling chunks of code out of a running computer application, AND IT IS STILL WORKING. > Jut how… INCREDIBLE is that? Can you imagine pulling random chunks of code out of the memory of your iPhone or Windows laptop, and still expecting it to work? Of course not! But with HTML, it’s a given. HTML isn't "run" in the way traditional compiled languages are. It's modular by design, so of course you can tear out parts and have it still work. And the way you're tearing out things is exactly on these module boundaries; if you really wanted to pull stuff out you'd do it at a random location so you get tags being cut off.
- tomc1985 9y ago
  HTML is just a datastructure, we just happen to use it more heavily than most. I think she makes a lot of very valid points, Web 3.0 is abandoning its foundational robustness for ... whatever the hell js dev is nowadays.
  - saagarjha 9y ago
    > HTML is just a datastructure Sure, that's a nice way to put it. If you remove data from it using its normal contract, of course it's bound to behavior reasonably well. If you go and take a linked list and start zeroing out random bits of a node's next pointer, of course it isn't going to work, and the same is true with HTML.
    - tomc1985 9y ago
      A good linked list implementation will also allow you to delete nodes through its normal contract
      - saagarjha 9y ago
ad-hominem 9y ago
Discussing HTML: > Just look at this video. It shows me pulling chunks out of the Amazon homepage as I browse it, while the page continues to run. Jut [sic] how… INCREDIBLE is that? Can you imagine pulling random chunks of code out of the memory of your iPhone or Windows laptop, and still expecting it to work? Of course not! But with HTML, it’s a given. Yeah, because HTML isn't a programming language, and it's not related to whether or not the browser can render some site. It has nothing to do with the code in the browser's sanity or the server serving content. The more accurate analogy would be "Could you imagine pulling random chunks out of a string that was passed to a string manipulation function, and the function still completing?!" And the answer is yes, I can imagine that. Especially considering it is a mundane fact of life for most web developers. It's almost like the author doesn't fully comprehend the difference between a markup language and a programming language.
- bandrami 9y ago
  Or, more likely, you don't comprehend the point she is making about the browser as a programming target. Go try SmallTalk for a while and you'll see what she's getting at.
  - ad-hominem 9y ago
    Not only are your points unrelated, but I'm intimately familiar with message-passing languages and metaprogramming. This article reads like somebody who is just beginning their understanding of computation and is fraught with inappropriate metaphors. Moreover, I understand her point completely and outlined the failures with her analogy above. Ripping out HTML while browsing a site has nothing to do with the "browser as a programming target" - no reasonable user would ever do that and 99% of jQuery scripts targeting websites would break if you drastically alter the HTML structure they depend on.
gnicholas 9y ago
The part about accessibility resonates strongly. I've definitely worked with visual designers who worked as if their primary audience was comprised primarily of other visual design professionals. News flash: they're not. They're regular people with a variety of aesthetic preferences, some of which you would abhor. And for some of them, the accessibility features that you find clunky or inelegant are critical for their ability to read and understand your website.
- originalsimba 9y ago
  This is a problem not limited to the development and design circles. It's a human problem. Disabled people are relatively rare, and so humans have a tendency to forget they exist. To some extent developers are a product of their customers' demands. If customers are emphasizing dirt prices ($200 websites what the hell is going on?) and launch deadlines of "a couple of hours", they aren't thinking about accessibility, along with a half dozen other things. It's really become evident to me since web development became a focus of my career, that people remain blissfully unaware of those less fortunate than them. Which we should shame out of them in my respected opinion. At the very least, all visual elements should include an alt tag. Making your content "readable" is a good idea anyway. One last thing, and sorry such a long comment, it occurs to me maybe a lot of websites aren't "accessible" because things like Alt tags would expose the manipulative subliminal tactics of the design.
  - ryandrake 9y ago
    Accessibility to disabled people is the right goal, but at this point, I'm often happily surprised to see software that is even accessible to fully abled people! So much software out there (on the web and otherwise) look and behave as if their purpose was to fill a spot on a slide deck, fill out the "frameworks" section of a developer's resume, or look sleek in an artist's portfolio, rather than be used by actual human users.
    - leggomylibro 9y ago
      That's one way of looking at it. Another is that with hobby projects, people often do the first 80% of the work, see that the concept works, and then move on before finishing the other 80%. There really aren't THAT many hours in a day.
strictnein 9y ago
> "Personally, this one blows my mind - it it still somehow not a core requirement of being a front end developer. It should be a core skill, the default on any frontend developers resume." Not sure if I agree with this. Ideally, this would be the case, but the tooling and dominant platforms just aren't as mature as they would need to be to consider it a required core skill. Doing Accessibility work feels like doing CSS work back in the late 90s. The dominant target platform, JAWS, is just a horribly coded product. It kinda, sorta, handles ARIA attributes and it kinda, sorta, does the same thing each time a page is loaded, but then also doesn't. And it's a very expensive tool. The "pro" version, which is the only version approved for dev work is $1100 (outside of the extended 90 trial for $179, I guess). Now consider that not only do your devs need copies, but so do your testers. And if they want to stay up to date, you're really looking more like $1100 + $550 a year. And, yes, there's other options, but since a lot of accessibility work is really more for lawsuit avoidance than anything else, not going with the industry standard isn't a wise choice. And, after all of that, unless you work someplace with enough funds to properly test out your product with, you know, actual users with visual impairment, what qualifies as good accessibility is difficult to suss out. You can run automated tools, but they're just code linting tools, more or less, and really speak nothing to the user experience. How do you really test out the UI you've developed? If you close your eyes or cover the screen you still know exactly what it looks like.
- heartbreak 9y ago
  > And it's a very expensive tool. The "pro" version, which is the only version approved for dev work is $1100 Which brings us to one of the author's other points: Not everyone is rich. There are many solo web developers who simply don't have the resources available to make their website accessible. Do we (in the U.S.) need an ADA for websites? We essentially applied it to government websites, but my personal blog doesn't have to be compliant. Regulation of that nature would have an immediate impact on solo and other small web developers, just like GDPR. Perhaps it's necessary, though, so that we aren't excluding wide swaths of people from having equal opportunities on the web. Edit: Note that certain interpretations (including court opinions) of ADA apply the public accommodation concept to business websites. I'm not aware of such an interpretation for personal websites as ADA would probably not apply.
tw1010 9y ago
The history of the internet is like a plane sweeping a metropolis starting in the sky. Each epoch intersects a number of buildings, and the level-set it creates can be seen as a representation of the demographic that used it in that instance. At first the plane only touched the very highest buildings. These people are all mostly comfortable and well off. What has fundamentally changed in the past few years, however, is a phase shift as the plane has reached further and further down towards the ground. Look around at street level in a city and what do you see? Buildings dedicated to social security, hospitals, less-well-off individuals, people on disability, and more diversity than the ecologically narrow space above. It reminds me of a quote by Obama: "Government will never run the way Silicon Valley runs because, by definition, democracy is messy. This is a big, diverse country with a lot of interests and a lot of disparate points of view. And part of government’s job, by the way, is dealing with problems that nobody else wants to deal with."
- lainga 9y ago
  Wouldn't the plane explode when it hit the highest buildings?
  - wolfgang42 9y ago
    I think this is a geometric plane, not an airplane. It doesn't explode because it has zero thickness and so can't interact with the atoms of the building materials.
xtracerx 9y ago
This article gave me ADHD.
originalsimba 9y ago
The irony here is the subjective nature of the article itself conflicts with the headline. Still it's a somewhat fun read but if you're into this stuff then you probably know the material already.
xab9 9y ago
Let me tell you what's more important than the user: design, bells and whistles, brand identity, tracking, ad-hoc A/B testing, banners, newsletter interstitials, page rank, comments on brand's facebook page, number of followers, claps, likes, thumbsups, reblogs, autoplaying videos, filler stock photos.
- justherefortart 9y ago
  Money. Money is the driver.
themihai 9y ago
The author seems to complain about old good HTML but fails to to mention the native apps. The future of the web(web 3.0/x.0) seems to be more about apps, mostly native apps than websites.
- amiga-workbench 9y ago
  I'm not sure I agree, most of the time I just want to read some text. I don't want an """experience"""
  - themihai 9y ago
    I believe most use the "experience" method. At least for the top sites such facebook, twitter, instagram, google, youtube etc. I even receive links from Apple news so I guess the "news" are moving to some kind of native experience too. Not to mention music services(i.e. spotify)
ElatedOwl 9y ago
>Diversity was understood; we loved and embraced different users and devices. The hilarious irony here is that supporting all devices is a contributing factor to the "problem". Yes, I want to support older versions of IE, mobile devices or whatever browser you're using. Frameworks like jQuery (or babel...) exist because of this.
- pythonaut_16 9y ago
  Not to mention the early iPhone days generally meant making a separate mobile or iPhone version of the site rather than embracing diversity. It's only been in the past few years that sites have started to work relatively well between mobile and desktop formats without a separate mobile site.
sdhgaiojfsa 9y ago
The bits about dial up ring a bit hollow when this page clocks in at >700kB and more than a hundred requests.
- talmand 9y ago
  Well, being part of the problem doesn't prevent one from complaining about the problem. But I see interesting stats in my network panel: HTML - 33.25K CSS - 65.89K (the bulk of which is Twitter, which looks to be the same stylesheet loaded multiple times; 3.2K without Twitter) JS - 53.62K (it appears all of it is Twitter) Images - 658.75K Media - 206.12K Stop using Twitter's code and build for users turning off images/media gets you a half-decent loading website.
  - ryanbrunner 9y ago
    On top of that, the page is 100% usable and readable with just the HTML, and the images will load more or less in order as you're reading, unlike a JS-driven site which will have that 700KB (or more) as a hard prerequisite to see anything.
jaclaz 9y ago
Very good IMHO that someone is "fighting from the inside", ar least verbally. I guess her previous post [2017] testing "mainstream" sites without Javascript is worth a mention: https://sonniesedge.co.uk/posts/a-day-without-javascript https://sonniesedge.co.uk/posts/a-day-without-javascript
smoe 9y ago
Related to the "Cutting the Mustard" of BBC part in the talk where they serve a core set of html/css and then depending on browser capabilities load additional js/css. What are people recommending for progressive enhancement these days? For sites that don't need a whole lot of js, but enough that just slapping on a bunch of jquery lines would get too messy. E.g. when you want to support sorting tables or saving forms without reloading the whole page. In other works, using js merely to make the experience smoother. Besides the points mentioned in the talk, setting up and maintaining a build pipeline for a fronted framework and maybe even server side rendering with it is just a vast overkill and unnecessary increase of complexity for the given problem. I used to use backbone.js for those kind of sites, because its view layer worked pretty well on already existing html and letting you fallback to it, while giving you more structure and modularity than plain js/jquery.
- girvo 9y ago
  I typically just write some DOM based JS for those situations. Web APIs do a lot more than we think these days. Write some data structures to drive them, maybe call Object.freeze if you want, perhaps use Immutable.js because it’s setter/getter functions are kind of nice, but really, I’ve not found a pressing need for many libraries for these “in between” sites myself.
ebiester 9y ago
It comes back to this: What are you doing with your page? If you are building a content delivery vehicle, this all makes sense. If you are building an interactive application, the html paradigm is terrible and we took it as far as we could. We really need to get away from HTML but that's going to require leadership. I recently went back and wrote an application with JavaFX. It's quite a bit easier than dealing with the fiddly bits of HTML, CSS, and JS. Web applications are terrible because we build on terrible abstractions for the purpose of applications, JS being the least worst of them. That's why we end up as an inverted pyramid.
rossdavidh 9y ago
I really, strongly agree with almost every point in this article (maybe even 100%). There is only one problem, and that is that it is aimed at developers. Sure, there are some developers who don't get this, but in every case where I've seen this debated, it is only developers who are in favor of accessibility, core HTML that works without JS, etc. There is often a debate or division among developers, but there is a non-zero number of developers advocating this. There have been, in numerous different organizations (educational, startup, big corporate) where I have worked, zero management support for any of this. Also, zero client support. These ideas typically die, because nobody but a (sometimes lone) developer is advocating for them, and they can't win the argument. Again, I 100% agree with the sentiment, and I'd love it if the web changed to work like this (again). But the obstacle is not developers, primarily, or at least they are the group (in my experience) most open to this argument. It is absolutely everybody else in the conversation (client, sales, management, design) who doesn't want to spend time or thought on it. I don't know how to solve that. If someone has experience succeeding at that, I'd love to read that post.
chapill 9y ago
Well, the main problem is HTML sucks. It can't do things literally everyone wants to do at one point or another. One example, scrolling table with fixed table head. Why is that not something I can specify declaratively? Why is that next to impossible, even with the aid of JavaScript. Where are tabs? Where are image carousels? Why is it that styling forms elements is still essentially impossible? Where are <select> elements with icons? Where are calendar date pickers that allow me to select multiple dates and ranges? Why was three columns with header and footer declared the "Holy Grail" of CSS for a decade? And does anyone remember building rounded corners with <b> tags? Basic basic basic structures that literally every developer is asked to build don't exist. Every developer everywhere has wasted ridiculous amounts of time making something barely functional which should have been stupidly simple.
- perilunar 9y ago
  >One example, scrolling table with fixed table head. Why is that not something I can specify declaratively? You can: tbody {display:block; height:50vh; overflow:scroll;}
blitz_skull 9y ago
What an arrogant prick. Get with the times. The web is what it is and sorry but empathy doesn't pay the bills.
hokus 9y ago
What most people don't know but is instantly obvious: Disabled people may spend their entire day reading web pages 365 days of the year. An estimate of half a million per year seems entirely reasonable if you cant do anything else. An average of 1 per minute seems entirely doable? If we think of websites not related to work. How many of those would the average person view per day? 5-20 ?
maxharris 9y ago
Dear Web Fanatics: Most Users Want Apps, Not Documents

191 points by NoGravitas 9y ago

Unrelated to the content, this is the best way to archive a presentation with notes that I've found. Much faster to read than to see an hour long video and not as cryptic as a bunch of mostly content-free slides.

cbcoutinho 9y ago
I totally agree, this is a way better format than the slideshare service through linkedin.
- hexo 9y ago
  there really is something like slideshare through linkedin? rofl
  - cbcoutinho 9y ago
    You've never seen static powerpoint slides uploaded to the linkedin slideshare site? Besides pdf files this is what I run into sometimes with physics and computational science presentations https://www.slideshare.net/linkedin https://www.slideshare.net/linkedin
blakesterz 9y ago
Any idea what she used to do this?
- Deimorz 9y ago
  Appropriately, I'm going to guess it was with HTML and CSS.
- tim333 9y ago
  Probably jekyll https://sonniesedge.co.uk/posts/jekyll https://sonniesedge.co.uk/posts/jekyll
Deimorz 9y ago
Maciej Ceglowski puts his talks up in a similar format (most recent example: http://idlewords.com/talks/ancient_web.htm http://idlewords.com/talks/ancient_web.htm). It definitely makes them easy to read, refer back to, etc.
cpeterso 9y ago
Ironically, this presentation is unusable on my phone in landscape orientation. The responsive landscape layout is a narrow column with just 2-3 words per line and tons of whitespace.

vesrah 9y ago

The requirements for the kind of things described here often come from above us in the form of creative comps, feature requirements, timeline constraints with respect to required functionality, etc. This is something that should probably have been touched on in this article. I do completely agree with the sentiment, so I guess this is just me projecting frustration :)

fhood 9y ago
I think a lot of people agree with the sentiment. Most of the points here are ones that have been hashed and rehashed countless times in various blog posts and whatnot. People just tend to write code first, and only worry about optimization if it becomes an explicit issue.
smoe 9y ago
I'm not sure if the requirement from above is true most of the time. A lot of developers nowadays default to using a SPA as the starting point for everything without even considering if they actually need the whole bouquet of fronted build pipeline, innumerable dependencies, reactive something and a dozen layers of abstractions to hardly do more than loading and turning JSON into html while showing a spinning thing. Sure, there are plenty of features of frontend frameworks that come in handy. But how often do devs truly analyze what the best tool for the job is vs. chasing after that shiny newthing.js which just came out.
- CM30 9y ago
  I don't think it's just about novelty here (though as said, chasing the new shiny thing seems to play a large role none the less), but also because: 1. Developers want their CV/resume to look good for the next job, and the best way to do that is to have a bunch of fancy technologies and frameworks on it. Going for what's simple and works best is great, but unfortunately not something recruiters (especially at large tech companies) care much about. 2. They're used to that one language or framework, and hence think every single problem under the sun should be solved with it. It's the old 'when all you have is a hammer' issue, and endemic in every company from the small agency to the large tech corporation.

jopuwep12489 9y ago

So glad to see this sentiment here, while every other HN post is about Javascript framework of the month. This is how you make stuff on the web.

saagarjha 9y ago

While I agree with the overall argument, there are a couple of points the author made on HTML that I don't think are quite true: > It is this flirty declarative nature makes HTML so incredibly robust. Just look at this video. It shows me pulling chunks out of the Amazon homepage as I browse it, while the page continues to run. > Let’s just stop and think about that, because we take it for granted. I’m pulling chunks of code out of a running computer application, AND IT IS STILL WORKING. > Jut how… INCREDIBLE is that? Can you imagine pulling random chunks of code out of the memory of your iPhone or Windows laptop, and still expecting it to work? Of course not! But with HTML, it’s a given. HTML isn't "run" in the way traditional compiled languages are. It's modular by design, so of course you can tear out parts and have it still work. And the way you're tearing out things is exactly on these module boundaries; if you really wanted to pull stuff out you'd do it at a random location so you get tags being cut off.

tomc1985 9y ago
HTML is just a datastructure, we just happen to use it more heavily than most. I think she makes a lot of very valid points, Web 3.0 is abandoning its foundational robustness for ... whatever the hell js dev is nowadays.
- saagarjha 9y ago
  > HTML is just a datastructure Sure, that's a nice way to put it. If you remove data from it using its normal contract, of course it's bound to behavior reasonably well. If you go and take a linked list and start zeroing out random bits of a node's next pointer, of course it isn't going to work, and the same is true with HTML.
  - tomc1985 9y ago
    A good linked list implementation will also allow you to delete nodes through its normal contract
    - saagarjha 9y ago

ad-hominem 9y ago

Discussing HTML: > Just look at this video. It shows me pulling chunks out of the Amazon homepage as I browse it, while the page continues to run. Jut [sic] how… INCREDIBLE is that? Can you imagine pulling random chunks of code out of the memory of your iPhone or Windows laptop, and still expecting it to work? Of course not! But with HTML, it’s a given. Yeah, because HTML isn't a programming language, and it's not related to whether or not the browser can render some site. It has nothing to do with the code in the browser's sanity or the server serving content. The more accurate analogy would be "Could you imagine pulling random chunks out of a string that was passed to a string manipulation function, and the function still completing?!" And the answer is yes, I can imagine that. Especially considering it is a mundane fact of life for most web developers. It's almost like the author doesn't fully comprehend the difference between a markup language and a programming language.

bandrami 9y ago
Or, more likely, you don't comprehend the point she is making about the browser as a programming target. Go try SmallTalk for a while and you'll see what she's getting at.
- ad-hominem 9y ago
  Not only are your points unrelated, but I'm intimately familiar with message-passing languages and metaprogramming. This article reads like somebody who is just beginning their understanding of computation and is fraught with inappropriate metaphors. Moreover, I understand her point completely and outlined the failures with her analogy above. Ripping out HTML while browsing a site has nothing to do with the "browser as a programming target" - no reasonable user would ever do that and 99% of jQuery scripts targeting websites would break if you drastically alter the HTML structure they depend on.

gnicholas 9y ago

The part about accessibility resonates strongly. I've definitely worked with visual designers who worked as if their primary audience was comprised primarily of other visual design professionals. News flash: they're not. They're regular people with a variety of aesthetic preferences, some of which you would abhor. And for some of them, the accessibility features that you find clunky or inelegant are critical for their ability to read and understand your website.

originalsimba 9y ago
This is a problem not limited to the development and design circles. It's a human problem. Disabled people are relatively rare, and so humans have a tendency to forget they exist. To some extent developers are a product of their customers' demands. If customers are emphasizing dirt prices ($200 websites what the hell is going on?) and launch deadlines of "a couple of hours", they aren't thinking about accessibility, along with a half dozen other things. It's really become evident to me since web development became a focus of my career, that people remain blissfully unaware of those less fortunate than them. Which we should shame out of them in my respected opinion. At the very least, all visual elements should include an alt tag. Making your content "readable" is a good idea anyway. One last thing, and sorry such a long comment, it occurs to me maybe a lot of websites aren't "accessible" because things like Alt tags would expose the manipulative subliminal tactics of the design.
- ryandrake 9y ago
  Accessibility to disabled people is the right goal, but at this point, I'm often happily surprised to see software that is even accessible to fully abled people! So much software out there (on the web and otherwise) look and behave as if their purpose was to fill a spot on a slide deck, fill out the "frameworks" section of a developer's resume, or look sleek in an artist's portfolio, rather than be used by actual human users.
  - leggomylibro 9y ago
    That's one way of looking at it. Another is that with hobby projects, people often do the first 80% of the work, see that the concept works, and then move on before finishing the other 80%. There really aren't THAT many hours in a day.

strictnein 9y ago

> "Personally, this one blows my mind - it it still somehow not a core requirement of being a front end developer. It should be a core skill, the default on any frontend developers resume." Not sure if I agree with this. Ideally, this would be the case, but the tooling and dominant platforms just aren't as mature as they would need to be to consider it a required core skill. Doing Accessibility work feels like doing CSS work back in the late 90s. The dominant target platform, JAWS, is just a horribly coded product. It kinda, sorta, handles ARIA attributes and it kinda, sorta, does the same thing each time a page is loaded, but then also doesn't. And it's a very expensive tool. The "pro" version, which is the only version approved for dev work is $1100 (outside of the extended 90 trial for $179, I guess). Now consider that not only do your devs need copies, but so do your testers. And if they want to stay up to date, you're really looking more like $1100 + $550 a year. And, yes, there's other options, but since a lot of accessibility work is really more for lawsuit avoidance than anything else, not going with the industry standard isn't a wise choice. And, after all of that, unless you work someplace with enough funds to properly test out your product with, you know, actual users with visual impairment, what qualifies as good accessibility is difficult to suss out. You can run automated tools, but they're just code linting tools, more or less, and really speak nothing to the user experience. How do you really test out the UI you've developed? If you close your eyes or cover the screen you still know exactly what it looks like.

heartbreak 9y ago
> And it's a very expensive tool. The "pro" version, which is the only version approved for dev work is $1100 Which brings us to one of the author's other points: Not everyone is rich. There are many solo web developers who simply don't have the resources available to make their website accessible. Do we (in the U.S.) need an ADA for websites? We essentially applied it to government websites, but my personal blog doesn't have to be compliant. Regulation of that nature would have an immediate impact on solo and other small web developers, just like GDPR. Perhaps it's necessary, though, so that we aren't excluding wide swaths of people from having equal opportunities on the web. Edit: Note that certain interpretations (including court opinions) of ADA apply the public accommodation concept to business websites. I'm not aware of such an interpretation for personal websites as ADA would probably not apply.

tw1010 9y ago

The history of the internet is like a plane sweeping a metropolis starting in the sky. Each epoch intersects a number of buildings, and the level-set it creates can be seen as a representation of the demographic that used it in that instance. At first the plane only touched the very highest buildings. These people are all mostly comfortable and well off. What has fundamentally changed in the past few years, however, is a phase shift as the plane has reached further and further down towards the ground. Look around at street level in a city and what do you see? Buildings dedicated to social security, hospitals, less-well-off individuals, people on disability, and more diversity than the ecologically narrow space above. It reminds me of a quote by Obama: "Government will never run the way Silicon Valley runs because, by definition, democracy is messy. This is a big, diverse country with a lot of interests and a lot of disparate points of view. And part of government’s job, by the way, is dealing with problems that nobody else wants to deal with."

lainga 9y ago
Wouldn't the plane explode when it hit the highest buildings?
- wolfgang42 9y ago
  I think this is a geometric plane, not an airplane. It doesn't explode because it has zero thickness and so can't interact with the atoms of the building materials.

xtracerx 9y ago

This article gave me ADHD.

originalsimba 9y ago

The irony here is the subjective nature of the article itself conflicts with the headline. Still it's a somewhat fun read but if you're into this stuff then you probably know the material already.

xab9 9y ago

Let me tell you what's more important than the user: design, bells and whistles, brand identity, tracking, ad-hoc A/B testing, banners, newsletter interstitials, page rank, comments on brand's facebook page, number of followers, claps, likes, thumbsups, reblogs, autoplaying videos, filler stock photos.

justherefortart 9y ago
Money. Money is the driver.

themihai 9y ago

The author seems to complain about old good HTML but fails to to mention the native apps. The future of the web(web 3.0/x.0) seems to be more about apps, mostly native apps than websites.

amiga-workbench 9y ago
I'm not sure I agree, most of the time I just want to read some text. I don't want an """experience"""
- themihai 9y ago
  I believe most use the "experience" method. At least for the top sites such facebook, twitter, instagram, google, youtube etc. I even receive links from Apple news so I guess the "news" are moving to some kind of native experience too. Not to mention music services(i.e. spotify)

ElatedOwl 9y ago

>Diversity was understood; we loved and embraced different users and devices. The hilarious irony here is that supporting all devices is a contributing factor to the "problem". Yes, I want to support older versions of IE, mobile devices or whatever browser you're using. Frameworks like jQuery (or babel...) exist because of this.

pythonaut_16 9y ago
Not to mention the early iPhone days generally meant making a separate mobile or iPhone version of the site rather than embracing diversity. It's only been in the past few years that sites have started to work relatively well between mobile and desktop formats without a separate mobile site.

sdhgaiojfsa 9y ago

The bits about dial up ring a bit hollow when this page clocks in at >700kB and more than a hundred requests.

talmand 9y ago
Well, being part of the problem doesn't prevent one from complaining about the problem. But I see interesting stats in my network panel: HTML - 33.25K CSS - 65.89K (the bulk of which is Twitter, which looks to be the same stylesheet loaded multiple times; 3.2K without Twitter) JS - 53.62K (it appears all of it is Twitter) Images - 658.75K Media - 206.12K Stop using Twitter's code and build for users turning off images/media gets you a half-decent loading website.
- ryanbrunner 9y ago
  On top of that, the page is 100% usable and readable with just the HTML, and the images will load more or less in order as you're reading, unlike a JS-driven site which will have that 700KB (or more) as a hard prerequisite to see anything.

jaclaz 9y ago

Very good IMHO that someone is "fighting from the inside", ar least verbally. I guess her previous post [2017] testing "mainstream" sites without Javascript is worth a mention: https://sonniesedge.co.uk/posts/a-day-without-javascript https://sonniesedge.co.uk/posts/a-day-without-javascript

smoe 9y ago

Related to the "Cutting the Mustard" of BBC part in the talk where they serve a core set of html/css and then depending on browser capabilities load additional js/css. What are people recommending for progressive enhancement these days? For sites that don't need a whole lot of js, but enough that just slapping on a bunch of jquery lines would get too messy. E.g. when you want to support sorting tables or saving forms without reloading the whole page. In other works, using js merely to make the experience smoother. Besides the points mentioned in the talk, setting up and maintaining a build pipeline for a fronted framework and maybe even server side rendering with it is just a vast overkill and unnecessary increase of complexity for the given problem. I used to use backbone.js for those kind of sites, because its view layer worked pretty well on already existing html and letting you fallback to it, while giving you more structure and modularity than plain js/jquery.

girvo 9y ago
I typically just write some DOM based JS for those situations. Web APIs do a lot more than we think these days. Write some data structures to drive them, maybe call Object.freeze if you want, perhaps use Immutable.js because it’s setter/getter functions are kind of nice, but really, I’ve not found a pressing need for many libraries for these “in between” sites myself.

ebiester 9y ago

It comes back to this: What are you doing with your page? If you are building a content delivery vehicle, this all makes sense. If you are building an interactive application, the html paradigm is terrible and we took it as far as we could. We really need to get away from HTML but that's going to require leadership. I recently went back and wrote an application with JavaFX. It's quite a bit easier than dealing with the fiddly bits of HTML, CSS, and JS. Web applications are terrible because we build on terrible abstractions for the purpose of applications, JS being the least worst of them. That's why we end up as an inverted pyramid.

rossdavidh 9y ago

I really, strongly agree with almost every point in this article (maybe even 100%). There is only one problem, and that is that it is aimed at developers. Sure, there are some developers who don't get this, but in every case where I've seen this debated, it is only developers who are in favor of accessibility, core HTML that works without JS, etc. There is often a debate or division among developers, but there is a non-zero number of developers advocating this. There have been, in numerous different organizations (educational, startup, big corporate) where I have worked, zero management support for any of this. Also, zero client support. These ideas typically die, because nobody but a (sometimes lone) developer is advocating for them, and they can't win the argument. Again, I 100% agree with the sentiment, and I'd love it if the web changed to work like this (again). But the obstacle is not developers, primarily, or at least they are the group (in my experience) most open to this argument. It is absolutely everybody else in the conversation (client, sales, management, design) who doesn't want to spend time or thought on it. I don't know how to solve that. If someone has experience succeeding at that, I'd love to read that post.

chapill 9y ago

Well, the main problem is HTML sucks. It can't do things literally everyone wants to do at one point or another. One example, scrolling table with fixed table head. Why is that not something I can specify declaratively? Why is that next to impossible, even with the aid of JavaScript. Where are tabs? Where are image carousels? Why is it that styling forms elements is still essentially impossible? Where are <select> elements with icons? Where are calendar date pickers that allow me to select multiple dates and ranges? Why was three columns with header and footer declared the "Holy Grail" of CSS for a decade? And does anyone remember building rounded corners with <b> tags? Basic basic basic structures that literally every developer is asked to build don't exist. Every developer everywhere has wasted ridiculous amounts of time making something barely functional which should have been stupidly simple.

perilunar 9y ago
>One example, scrolling table with fixed table head. Why is that not something I can specify declaratively? You can: tbody {display:block; height:50vh; overflow:scroll;}

blitz_skull 9y ago

What an arrogant prick. Get with the times. The web is what it is and sorry but empathy doesn't pay the bills.

hokus 9y ago

What most people don't know but is instantly obvious: Disabled people may spend their entire day reading web pages 365 days of the year. An estimate of half a million per year seems entirely reasonable if you cant do anything else. An average of 1 per minute seems entirely doable? If we think of websites not related to work. How many of those would the average person view per day? 5-20 ?

maxharris 9y ago

Dear Web Fanatics: Most Users Want Apps, Not Documents